Re: A couple of things that I think should be in byte bytecode meta comments

[Rocky Bernstein <rocky@gnu.org>]

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On Sat, Dec 23, 2017 at 1:30 PM, Robert Weiner <rsw@gnu.org> wrote:

> ​... It is a matter of utility, not of havoc.
>

Reminds me of the discussions I recall having decades ago with colleagues
who maintained that undo wasn't necessary, since they always got in the
habit of saving the file before making important changes.

​
>
>> ​Ok. this was a just suggestion. That it has caused such negative
>> reaction, I've seen before in other venues, and I'm sorry.
>> ​​
>> For my part, I know what I can do to handle my concerns when or if I
>> decide to improve the error reporting and debugging situation on Emacs.
>> Yes, I am sorry I didn't say at the outset that this is were I envision
>> this getting used.
>>
>
> ​Yes, an easy to follow use case would be helpful.
>

I've spent too much time in this thread at the expense of working in things
that will have a more direct benefit to society.  The easy-to-follow stuff
will have to be deferred.



> I am very much in favor of improving Emacs' error messages, especially
> anything that leads to the source of an error when a backtrace is not
> produced.
>

Great -  think about it it and discuss it with your colleagues. I am eager
to hear what you have to offer.

  If you can explain how something you envision could make that happen,
> then you'll likely see feedback change.
>

I made an inadvertent mistake when I made the suggestion assuming that
others' experience and background here was similar to mine. I'm sure you
are right, but as I said, right now I don't think this is an effective use
of either my or emacs-devs' limited time. So again, rather than explain, I
will defer on this.

None of the feedback here so far has been particularly helpful in getting
things done. So right now having feedback change through more verbiage
isn't important and doesn't feel like it is going to be a winner either.

Here is an analogous situation that might explain my position. Rather than
explain "undo" to a community where there are some that are more vocally
disposed to opine that frequent saves are good enough, a better approach
(and more pleasing too)  would just to create "undo" and let the feature
sell itself - or not. (I know some who are still "I don't need undo"
believers)

There are some communities where one suggests something and people respond
with the default response: is why? And there are other communities where
the response is; why not?

Because Emacs is critically used, by necessity the overwhelming and more
vocal group is in the "why?" the camp. There are other venues that have the
luxury to be more in the "why not?" camp for things like this.


> BTW, I think there might be a good idea in there about using hash codes to
> verify valid use of a file,
>

Glad to have introduced you to this idea.  I am eager to see what you do
with it.

though my personal experience is that incompatible byte codes are well
> reported by Emacs and have not caused me any problems to date.
>

This has nothing to do with incompatible byte codes. I think you are
conflating this with another thread.

The much bigger problem is tracing an error raised from C code back to the
> source function that raised it when running without a C debugger active.
> Without that, users can't provide much of a bug report except possibly how
> to trigger the problem.
>


Ok.  Think about and discuss. Again, I look forward to hearing what you
come up with.



> Bob
>
>
>

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